


The Hollow Hearted

by StormBlue



Series: Hollow Hearts [1]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Brel, M/M, Vermilion - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 10:23:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15168626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormBlue/pseuds/StormBlue
Summary: Brothers become enemies and brothers who had become lovers become something worse. Set during the Bloodravens civil war.





	The Hollow Hearted

**Author's Note:**

> Feathers my own original character and that of a friend. Warning for a toxic relationship.

Vermillion became him. It dripped in fat drops down his gauntlets, pooling at his feet and below the man it all belonged to. Red on red. A soft, sallow face breathed hard, tasting the metallic air with too many senses. Already wracked with emotion, the smell of it was about to make his eyes water. 

“Please.” He pleaded, shaking so hard the knife he had pressed against his brother’s throat drew a jagged line of ruby, too bright to be human. “Brel, please. I love you.”

The other said nothing. Refused to say anything. Unable to understand the logic Vermillion had tried to impose on him, he was instead attacked with millions of lines of scrap code. Invasive. Altering. Permanent. Designed specifically for him by someone who knew him too well. The urge to fall was strong. His feelings for the younger man now standing poised to kill him even more so. Brel began to cry just as Vermillion’s own tears spilled over, splashing his nearly fleshless face.

Time began to speed up, returning to the great battle that was still taking place. Bolters fired, chainswords roared and foul litanies that never should have come from familiar mouths punctured the haze. Vermillion froze, startled as Brel’s eyes began to clear.

It was all the warning he had before the techmarine’s servo arm swung about, brutally smashing into his lover’s chest hard enough to nearly shatter it. Spiderweb fissures formed, deforming the black raven sigil, exploding the fine red gem set in the body. Fine fragments scattered like crystalized blood drops. Vermillion gasped, winded completely. 

Already heavily injured himself, Brel got up only thanks to his augments. Even so, he limped terribly, his single organic leg nearly ripped free of the socket. Only by the grace of his sacred armor did he walk.

“You did…this to yourself.” Brel finally spoke. It rasped with a hopeless finality and the harshness of steel.

Vermillion righted himself at last, a poisonous mixture of emotions still racing through his own mind and across his wet face. “I did this to myself? Brother! What right do you have to judge me?” He laughed nervously, running his soaking red gauntlets over trembling cheeks. “You had promised me your heart!”

A distortion. It wasn’t the vox. It wasn’t anything or anyone else but Vermillion. His voice had hit such a fevered pitch that it seemed to bend over onto itself, becoming inhuman and awful. Unfamiliar. Unreal.

“You had promised me your heart!”

Beforehand he had been so afraid to hurt Brel that now, seeing his lover rush at him with a knife drawn, surprised him lethally. Feeling the cold steel slide into a crack in Brel's armor, it breeched before breaking at the hilt. Then Vermillion tore into him from there with literally nothing but his mounting, anguished rage and his own hands. Brel flailed, struggled, but the other man had gotten him off guard. First ceramite came away, and then adamantium. Then, finally, the black carapace and the icy touch of air. The wound that the knife had created had not had time to clog just…

Ah!

“You told me…” Vermillion began to say as Brel’s world became awash in static and agony. "You told me I had your heart, Brel…you made me do this. I only wanted your heart, just one…”

He was lost then. The crazed glow. The sight of his own still beating heat laying in his lover’s hands was too much. He would have regurgitated if his esophagus was still wholly organic. Instead, he wheezed through the vox port that replaced most of his larynx, willing his body to close off the blood flow before it could run into his stomach. He watched in a daze of tears as Vermillion shed his own, kissing the organ as it finally went cold and still. “It’s mine now, Brel…”

“Yes.” Brel choked. “It is. And I will kill you for it.”

Vermillion had made one grave mistake. He had not restrained the techmarine at all and he still had his own knife. A fine bone handle. A long curved blade made from black iron forged from his and Vermillion’s homeworld. It only made sense that this would be what would end it.

With the scrap code sicking his mind, Brel lurched forward with a roar and drove it into Vermillion’s neck.

There was no scream. No final word. Nothing.

Shredded armor hung from the techmarine’s body in scraps. Shakily, mechadendrites slithered forth, unsealing and stealing parts and pieces from the other, who now lay as he once did. Bleeding. His real arm, the one still wrapped in flesh and muscle, touched the faceted dent where the the fine Terran ruby had shattered. It was over. A burden gained. 

He…

Processing…processing…

Null.


End file.
